I just had to hold on.
Jim landed next to me. His enormous jaguar jaws gaped open, wide, wider, wider . . . His bite was twice as powerful as that of a lion. He could crack a turtle shell with his teeth.
The loup reared his head.
Jim bit down, his massive fangs piercing the temporal bones of the loup’s skull, just in front of his ears. The bones crackled like eggshells. Jim’s teeth sank into the loup’s brain. The abomination screamed. His claws raked my back one last time and went limp. Jim squeezed harder. The head broke apart in his mouth and he spat the pieces onto the floor and crushed the sickening remains with his foot.
I crawled off the body. Every cell in me ached. Wounds gaped across Jim’s frame. He was torn up all over.
Jim landed next to me, leaned over, and gently licked my bloody face with his jaguar tongue. I whined and rolled my big head against him. He kissed me again, cleaning my cuts, his touch gentle and tender. I love you, too, Jim. I love you so much. Guess what? We won. It was worth it.
“You can’t get me,” Steven said. His voice shook a little. “I’m in the ward.”
We turned and looked at him with our glowing eyes. Silly man. We have faced our worst fear. There was nothing he could do to us now.
“We’re cats,” Jim said, his voice a rough growl. “We can wait hours for the mouse to leave the mouse hole. And when the magic wave ends, your mouse hole will collapse.”
Steven’s face turned white as a sheet.
“Squeak, little mouse,” Jim said, his voice raising my hackles. “Squeak while we wait.”
“DO I look okay?”
“Yes,” Jim said. “You look gorgeous.”
“Is my lipstick too bright?”
“No.”
“I should’ve braided my hair.”
“I like your hair.”
I turned to him. We were sitting in a Pack Jeep in front of a large house. The air smelled of wood smoke, cooked meat, and people.
“Don’t be a chicken,” Jim said.
“What if they don’t like me?”
“They will like you, but if they don’t, I won’t care.” Jim got out of the car, walked over to the passenger door, and opened it for me. I stepped out. I was wearing a cute little dress and a sun hat. My back was a little scarred and Jim was limping and careful with his right side, but that couldn’t be helped. In a month or two, even the scars would dissolve. Steven wouldn’t be so lucky. The world was better without him in it.
Jim was ringing the doorbell.
Help. Help me.
“Don’t say anything up front,” I murmured. “We can just let them sort of come to terms with it . . .”
The door swung open. An older African-American woman stood in the doorway. She wore an apron, and she had big dark eyes, just like Jim.
“Dali, this is my mother,” Jim said. “Mom, this is Dali. She’s my mate.”
LUCKY CHARMS
LISA SHEARIN
The beep from the tracking chip was continuous and the dot had stopped blinking.
Yasha pulled over where Ian indicated.
McDonald’s?
It was four in the morning. I was in a stolen bakery delivery truck that’d been nearly totaled by three gargoyles. In the truck with me were two hungover elves, a pair of stoned leprechauns with the munchies, a naked Russian werewolf, and a hot partner, who was actually more of a bodyguard, in a race against a goblin dark mage to retrieve a leprechaun prince with a tracking chip embedded in his left ass cheek.
The trail ended at a McDonald’s in the Bronx.
This had to be weird, even by SPI standards.
It was a hell of a night for my first day on the job at Supernatural Protection and Investigations.
Six hours earlier
“How the hell did you lose five horny leprechauns in a strip club?”
I paused just outside the conference room door and mentally filed that shouted little gem under “Questions you don’t usually hear in an office setting.”
Five SPI agents—three humans and two elves—stood in front of their manager, sheepish or flat-out embarrassed expressions on their faces. They looked nervous. They had every reason to be.
Their manager looked human, but his behavior—and bulging yellow eyes—suggested he might have a smidgen of ogre blood swimming around in his veins. The popular belief that ogres were dumber than a stump wasn’t true. They were raging, type A overachievers, which might be good in the corporate world but was definitely bad for tolerating failure.
“But, sir, we—”
“Don’t ‘but, sir’ me, Agent Phelps.” His voice was getting deeper, more gravelly, and definitely ogreish with each word. “You had an assignment, and since all five of you are back here, that means there are five unguarded leprechaun royals out there.”
A skinny elf opened his mouth to speak.